Odesa resident twice convicted for attempting to recruit SBU officer

The Prymorskyi District Court approved a plea agreement on high treason between a resident of Odesa and the prosecutor and sentenced the convict to four years in prison, which he has already served.

As noted in the court' s verdict, the fact is that the case was reviewed again and in 2019 the court already sentenced the man to three years in prison for this crime.

However, the prosecutor then appealed this verdict, demanding 12 years in prison, the minimum sentence provided for by the Criminal Code of Ukraine. It should be noted that under martial law, the minimum sentence is 15 years.

Case history

In the period 2015-2018, the man lived in Odesa, but traveled to the occupied Crimea and there began cooperation with the Russian Federal Security Service on the Black Sea Fleet. So he decided to recruit an SBU officer, an employee of the Main Counterintelligence Department in Odesa region, for them.

The counterintelligence officer pretended to agree to cooperate with Russia and provided the recruiter with a flash drive with information that was useless because it was false. So in 2018, the recruiter was detained and served two years in a pre-trial detention center, after which he was released on bail of UAH 315,000. When the court sentenced him in 2019, the accused pleaded guilty, repented and claimed that he needed money for the treatment of his father, who suffered from cancer and then eventually died. In addition, he said that he was supporting two young children.

The prosecutor, in turn, insisted that the man's father had died much earlier in the story and appealed the verdict. The Mykolaiv Court of Appeal subsequently overturned the verdict. As the judges in Mykolaiv found out, the composition of the judges in the Prymorskyi court changed during the trial, but they did not approve the ruling that there was no need to start the trial from the beginning.

He has already served his sentence

Despite the fact that the convict had been in the pre-trial detention center for two years, this period was counted as four - a day in the pre-trial detention center, two in prison. The bail of 315 thousand hryvnias will not be returned - according to the agreement with the prosecutor, the convict will use it and another 285 thousand hryvnias for the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Кирило Бойко